WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

Search This Blog

WATCH OUR MONTHLY WEBtv SHOW

SUPPORT OTT ON PATREON

Click on this logo to find out more about helping CFZtv and getting some smashing rewards...

SIGN UP FOR OUR MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

CRYPTOZOOLOGY NEWS: The Iceland serpent, and the Siberian mammoth explained

So the two great cryptzoological stories of the last week or so have been solved - apparently. First up is that bloody mammoth which was actually the better executed of the two media sensations.

The general opinion within the cryptozoological community both on this blog and elsewhere was that it showed a bear with a large salmon in its mouth. Now, it is claimed that the person who shot the original footage has come forward and denounced it as a fake.

Ludovic Petho came forward to say he shot the video that made headlines during a 10-day hike in Siberia's Sayan Mountains in 2011. He recognizes the footage as his own except for one thing: his original video never showed a mammoth.

Finland's Miisa McKeown has analyzed the video, matching up the position of the monster's head with relation to static reference points. Her conclusion? The "monster" is actually stuck in one place on the river. The snaky thing looks as if it's swimming upstream because water is streaming past it. It's the moving water that creates the illusion of a swimming snake.It appears that the monster was nothing more than a piece of fishing net snagged in a river.

The thing that I find particularly interesting is not that both videos were not what they pretended to be. I never thought they were. But that - if these explanations are true - they are completely at variance with what the cryptozoological community (who didn't believe in them either) thought that they were.

I have a sneaking suspicion that both these stories have some life in them yet!

3 comments:

This sort of thing is going to happen more and more, you know. That fake Nessie photo of mine took perhaps fifteen minutes to construct using the free Linux tool GIMP (as opposed to the far superior Photoshop suite). It looks vaguely realistic; more work on placing it would make it look even better, but that pic is what a complete amateur with a mediocre set of tools can knock together in minutes.

When you take a professional image manipulation system, and one of the usual shaky, shonky rubbish videos that purport to be "Idiot with camera sees Bigfoot/Nessie/UFO/ghost" and so on, then you have a recipe for more and more rubbish fakes.

The mammoth looked to me like a video of a small Indian elephant walking along a flat surface, with a curiously even water wave superimposed in front of it, and the whole placed onto the film of the flowing river. It looked realistic, if somehow slightly wrong due to the evenness of the wave upstream of the animal.

That is today's technology and software, as presumably created by a non-professional. Do the same thing with a much better-equipped professional with a Beowulf cluster and decent software, and you'd not be able to tell it from reality. This is the future; we're going to be awash with dubious filmatic fakes.

BTW, Ludovic came in early on and posted notice on my blog that he had shot the footage but there was no mammoth there, only bears. Tyler Stone had suggested just before that the image was computer generated and as it turnred out the actual explanation dovetailed both comments.

And I in no way believe the Icelandic "Serpent" was an effect innocently duplicated by a loose piece of fishing equipment, I'm holding out for a deliberate hoax using a mechanical device.

Read our Journal ... for Free

BUY THE JOURNAL OF CRYPTOZOOLOGY #4

WE ALSO PUBLISH A FREE WEEKLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

Try some buy some?

LATEST HITS

This blasted recession is really beginning to hit. Unlike some of our competitors we are not going to try and blackmail you into donating by saying that we won't continue if you don't. That would just be vulgar, but our lives, and those of the animals which we look after, would be a damn sight easier if we receive more donations to our fighting fund. Donate via Paypal today...